Host Karen Wright Marsh tells the little known story of Mother Theresa and discusses her complex life with Jonathan Merritt, award-winning faith and culture writer.
While Mother Theresa (1910-1997) lived, she was an icon of smiling sanctity, yet her private posthumous letters reveal the dark side of her faith: a reckoning with God’s silence. Was Mother Theresa a hypocrite after all? Or is she the perfect saint for our lonely, anxious times?
Guest Jonathan Merritt is an award-winning writer on religion, culture, and politics. He writes for The Atlantic and is the author of several critically-acclaimed books including: Learning to Speak God from Scratch: Why Sacred Words are Vanishing - and How We Can Revive Them. Jonathan has published more than 3500 articles in respected outlets from The New York Times to Christianity Today. Learn more at jonathanmerritt.com.
For further reading, Karen recommends:
“A Saint’s Dark Night” by James Martin in The New York Times
Become a podcast partner! Make your gift at: www.theologicalhorizons.org/giving.
Transcript
Karen Marsh (00:13):
Welcome to the Vintage Saints and Sinners podcast. I'm Karen Wright Marsh. Do you wonder if Christian faith can be truly lived in today's complex and changing world? Well, this is the place to find broken and beautiful companions for your everyday pilgrimage. Here, you'll find embodied witnesses, Christians from different eras and from different cultures. They're people we sometimes call saints, but they were also sinners, just like you and me today. I'm here to tell you the story of Mother Teresa, and then to talk about it with a good friend of mine, Jonathan Merritt. I'm glad you're here with us.
Karen Marsh (01:32):
No saint has ever been more in the public eye than Mother Teresa. You can see her on YouTube right there giving her life for the poor. Mother Teresa bends down to embrace a dying man. She looks up and declares: Christ is in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile that we give, and the smile that we receive. This woman, who is sometimes called the Saint of the gutters, seems to draw from a bottomless well of warm, liquid, supernatural peace. So it's a shock to read the letters that were published after mother Teresa died, for they recount an interior journey that she confessed only to her closest spiritual confidants. Mother Teresa's private letters reveal a woman who suffered deeply for decades, who felt abandoned by God. She writes: "in my soul, I feel just that terrible pain of loss of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God, not really existing.
Karen Marsh (02:42):
She laments that her prayers feel miserably dry and frozen. It gets so bad that she confesses that she can't even pray any longer. These confessions from her just don't make any sense. Now I certainly have no cause to dismiss Teresa as a hypocrite. I wouldn't say that she didn't believe what she preached, but I'm shaken by her revelations. How could it be possible that God fell silent for mother Teresa of all people after everything she sacrificed in the name of Jesus? What could it mean that mother Teresa kept talking about God's love even when she herself felt spiritual darkness, even interior desolation? Who was this woman really? And who was the Jesus that she kept on loving?
Karen Marsh (03:39):
Mother Teresa was born in Albania, named Agnes. And she felt a call to the religious life from a young age. She left home to become a missionary in India, where she excitedly proclaimed herself the happiest nun in the world.
Karen Marsh (03:56):
And if you'd met mother Teresa later at 36 years old, you would have seen a devoted but unremarkable teaching sister at a girl's school in Calcutta. What you wouldn't have known is that Teresa had made a private, personal promise to God. The vow that she would refuse nothing of God, no matter what God asked of her. Theresa's pledge was to be tested in ways that she couldn't imagine. One day Theresa was aboard a slow grimy train to Darjeeling, when she plainly heard a voice and the voice said, "would you not help?" It was Jesus speaking. She knew it clear as day. She heard Jesus ask her to leave the safety of the convent and go to the worst slums where he, Jesus, waited for her in his most distressing disguise: in the bodies of the poor. This happiest nun was terrified at the prospect of eating, of sleeping, of living alongside the poorest Indians.
Karen Marsh (05:04):
And yet the voice of Jesus came again. "Would you refuse to do this for me?" The voice insisted come, come carry me into the holes of the poor. Come be my light. Over months of conversation with this voice, her new life of radical compassionate service took shape and formed the iconic woman we know as mother Teresa. Teresa exchanged her nun's habit for simple cotton sari, and with only five coins in her pocket walked out of the convent alone to seek Jesus in the desperate byways of Calcutta. A few sisters joined Teresa and they called themselves the Missionaries of Charity. In the face of endless need, Mother Teresa always insisted on cheerfulness. To tend the suffering bodies of even dying people was to touch the literal body of Jesus. And as she saw it, who wouldn't be happy to live intimately with Jesus 24 hours a day? Mother Teresa labored nonstop. The Nobel peace prize, honorary doctorates and donations, all piled up.
Karen Marsh (06:25):
The Missionaries of Charity grew and spread to 123 countries in mother Teresa's lifetime. And when she died at 87, she was still as committed as ever. And mother Teresa never stopped speaking of the joy of serving. But unknown to the world, Teresa's guiding voice had gone silent. Jesus simply stopped speaking early in her ministry, and for decades, she felt alone in the silence. Teresa wrote privately to her spiritual director saying, "I am told God loves me, and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul." How, why, did Teresa keeps smiling? In making her private promise to God, young mother Teresa had done something perilous. She had asked to share life fully with Jesus. And in this life on earth, Jesus Christ himself had cried out, "God, why have you forsaken me?" Mother Teresa bravely converted her feelings of abandonment by God into an act of abandonment to God.
Karen Marsh (07:50):
Mother Teresa understood a painful truth I think, that the worst poverty is not always physical. The worst poverty is sometimes the distress of loneliness, of not being loved, of not being wanted. This is a great suffering of our questioning, anxious, modern age, and mother Teresa felt that poverty too. And when it came to following Christ, she called not for feelings, but for faithfulness. Mother Teresa's motto was always "keep smiling." And I'll admit, it always sounded trite to me. But knowing more of her story, I no longer dismiss her as an unearthly enraptured Saint. I hear in her words, a call to courage. We can do no great things, she says, only small things with great love. Serve God, she says, even when emotion, peace and conviction fail. Put love into action. Stay faithful, anyway.
Karen Marsh (09:10):
The Vintage Saints and Sinners podcast is the audio companion to my book, Vintage Saints and Sinners: Twenty-five Christians who transformed my faith. To learn more, come on by my website, karenwrightmarsh.com. Please rate and review this podcast on iTunes, and invite your friends to join us. Now, for a conversation about mother Teresa, with my friend, Jonathan Merritt.
Karen Marsh (09:44):
I'm delighted to welcome my friend, Jonathan Merritt here. He's an award winning writer on religion, culture and politics. His latest book is called Learning to Speak God from Scratch: Why Sacred Words are Vanishing and How We Can Revive Them. Jonathan serves as a writer for the Atlantic among many other media outlets. I'm so happy that you here Jonathan. Thank you for joining me.
Jonathan Merritt (10:07):
Oh gosh. The pleasure is all mine.
Karen Marsh (10:10):
Well, so mother Teresa. I know that you spent some time with the Missionaries of Charity shortly after her death. I am so curious to hear about your time with them.
Jonathan Merritt (10:20):
Man. Several years ago now I was traveling with a friend of mine doing a pilgrimage of poverty through India and Nepal. It was about a three week trip. We were living among the poor and serving the poor, an immersive kind of experience to see what it's like to be in that part of the world. Living like so many people are unfortunately forced to live. And so we traveled to Calcutta and I was able to kind of stop by mother Teresa's grave to pay my respects, which alone was kind of a learning experience. You know, it's kind of a simple white stone grave, unadorned, that almost kind of aligns her death with her life. No extravagance, no decoration. I think there were folding chairs around the outside of the room where you could sit and then a sister mercy came by and registered me for service and sent me on my way. And that was sort of the beginning of what was really an overwhelming day encountering some things that I've never experienced in my life before or since.
Karen Marsh (11:35):
What do they have you doing? What did sister mercy send you off to do?
Jonathan Merritt (11:39):
I was serving in the male ward. They don't even have time to sort of bring you up to speed. There are people laying on the ground in the court yard, staring into the distance, never speaking. I just sort of stood there in silence, moans filling the air, emaciated bodies, as far as the eye could see. One of the volunteers there said "you, sir," I remember "you, sir." He had this thick German accent. He said, come assist me. And so I kind of became this man's assistant for the day. So we, the first patient was laying on the floor. His foot was swollen to probably three or four times the normal size. It smelled of almonds. It was green, it was gangrenous. And he said to me, this man has not bathed in more than 10 years. He said, the skin around his wound is like the scales of a fish.
Jonathan Merritt (12:40):
And we have to scrub it before we can treat him. It's going to be very painful and I need you to hold him down. And so he picked up a wire brush, kind of like the kind of brush that maybe you'd clean your grill with, you know. We went back and forth. Sometimes I would hold him and he would scrub and sometimes he would hold him and I would scrub, and the man was screaming. And at the end of that encounter this German man came to me with Vaseline and toenail clippers, and hand it to me and said, now make him love you again. You know, I rubbed salve into his skin on his leg, and I clipped his gnarled toenails, and his breathing patterns returned to normal. And there was no time to grieve it. It was like that one after the other, after the other, there was always more work to do than could be done
Karen Marsh (13:31):
And for the people who live there, who serve there, these missionaries of charity, how do you think they keep their sanity or their perspective in the face of that endless need and pain?
Jonathan Merritt (13:44):
I think underneath it all, there has to be a sense of calling. You know, I was there without a sense of calling and just a day or two almost did me in. When I returned to home after this, I was serving at the time on a staff at a church and I would be sitting in staff meetings and I would just break out into tears. I would go into screaming fits. They would send me home. It truly, you truly have to have a calling or there is no way that I think the human heart can sustain itself in that type of setting,
Karen Marsh (14:20):
What do we do with our feelings of insufficiency? You know, having seen that kind of suffering, you can't come home and go on with your life. I mean, how do you frame your privilege, your comfort, your wealth relative to that? How do you even begin to feel okay about living this life that you have that you've been given?
Jonathan Merritt (14:39):
I think about that man that I worked with that day, who I think kind of distilled down the lesson for me. And he said, you know, I held that man as you cleaned his feet, did we change him? He said, you know, maybe, but he'll need to be cleaned again. But I know he's changed us. And he said, that's why I'm here, because I read Jesus's words in Matthew about being the salt of the earth. And I never understood what Jesus meant. And then he turned and he looked back into the courtyard and he says, but now I know. And I've really thought about that because what it reminded me is that there is this kind of work all around us and it doesn't look the way it looks in Calcutta. But that witness, to me, is to scrub the feet that I come into contact with. And often that is not nearly as spectacular, it doesn't require as much sacrifice. And yet somebody has to do that work, too. And in that way, we come to understand what Jesus means when he says you are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world
Karen Marsh (15:52):
And mother Teresa herself said, you know, find your own Calcutta. I guess it's up to us to understand what that means to us, what the call is to us.
Jonathan Merritt (16:02):
Yeah. You know, you know, I've been studying lately the kind of proto feminist mystics of the middle ages. And one of the things that I find is really consistent with these mystics is they all have this real sense of calling, but it's, it happens for them, I think in a more spectacular way than it than it's happened in my life. But then you find the same with mother Teresa, that there is a calling that is paired with a context. And the context changes, you're called into this particular context to do something, to serve God in some way. It's not like, you know, just what would Jesus do, it's what would Jesus have me to do, in the place where Jesus has placed me? And so I love that quote in that chapter of the book, "find your own Calcutta." For me, my Calcutta, at least for now happens to be Manhattan. And so I have to go out and find those feet. I have to go out and find those people, and it looks different, but I think that's the call for me.
Karen Marsh (17:04):
Can you think of a time recently where you have felt that call in Manhattan? What did that look like?
Jonathan Merritt (17:10):
I spent some time in Manhattan at a home there for people who are suffering from HIV/AIDS. You know, we didn't do anything really spectacular, but we had game night and we had humanizing conversations. We handed out Oreos. But these are people who often live without the gift of physical touch. And they often live without the gift of eye contact. I'm not saving their life maybe, but I think in some way, just by looking them in the eye, by playing a game of Scrabble, by handing that person an Oreo, in some way there was an incarnation that happened. You know, it maybe isn't the type of thing that sounds interesting. It will never make me a Saint, you know, the level of sacrifice was significantly lower than someone like a mother Teresa, but I think it moved the needle. And I think it taught me something about what it means to be salt and light.
Karen Marsh (18:21):
Well, Jonathan, I want to talk to you a little bit about this controversy over mother Teresa, when her letters came out and the world could see that this woman who was so incredibly committed, who always smiled, was experiencing incredible desolation and loneliness. What does that story say to you?
Jonathan Merritt (18:42):
Well, I think for a lot of people it sort of shattered their conception of mother Teresa. It didn't for me, it humanized her for me. It actually, I think made her seem more like me. It made her more accessible. And I think the reason is, is because I've always been kind of a doubter, and faith to me doesn't mean resolving our doubts. It means continuing to ask those questions, often with great doubt. And that's what I see in her. Somebody who still stuck it out and still did the thing that she felt called to do, even though that voice fell silent. And so in some ways, and I don't know, maybe I'm reading my own life experience into her story, it seems like a chronology of faith. When you read about her early calling experience and the idealism and the trust and the zeal and that crystal clear voice of God, I used to have that kind of experience with God. And that's not my experience anymore. It is often more lonely. It is often now mixed with a profound amount of doubt. And so the witness of someone like mother Teresa, continuing to serve in the midst of that, boy that seems like, that seems a lot like what I'm doing these days. You know, it seems to me that oftentimes saints are a product of the age that birth them. You know, that mother Teresa perhaps is a Saint for her time. In some ways, do you think that she was the kind of Saint we needed?
Karen Marsh (20:30):
I do. And I think her cheerfulness, you know, her outer sanctity always felt very intimidating to me. And yet when I know that she struggled with loneliness and doubt, I feel like, okay, I'm like her. And I think the idea, the physical suffering, which we could see what you saw up close in Calcutta, we all agree that is a horrific thing. And that people all around the world suffer so deeply with poverty and illness and inequality. And yet the suffering that so many people experience, the suffering of loneliness, the suffering of feeling alienated, of lacking purpose, you know, that's a suffering too. And I think she gives us space to recognize that as suffering in its own right. And something that maybe we all feel, maybe that's the kind of suffering that you see in Manhattan, you know, in the financial district, and close to where you live. So yeah, I think that the idea of the context of a Saint is really an interesting one to think about. Well, thank you so much for sharing your experience. It's really fun to talk to you, Jonathan, about mother Teresa and your experience there. And thank you for reflecting on her life and witness with me today.
Jonathan Merritt (21:48):
Oh, my pleasure.
Karen Marsh (22:02):
Perhaps like me, you've always been intimidated by the saintly selfless figure of mother Teresa, out there saving the world. Well, going deeper into her story and then talking it through with Jonathan, I've come to a completely new place with this Saint of the gutters. I feel sorrow for her. As I imagine her many years of loneliness and spiritual darkness, I feel affection for her. That small, but mighty woman who gets up every morning and does what needs to be done without collapsing and without giving up. Most of all, I feel gratitude for this sister Saint who remains faithful to her calling, who keeps on loving Christ, even when it couldn't be more difficult. Mother Teresa challenges Jonathan, she challenges me, and I hope she challenges you too, to find your own Calcutta and make a difference there. Thank you for joining me today.
Karen Marsh (23:14):
I'm Karen Wright Marsh and I'm the executive director Theological Horizons, a ministry based in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia. I'd love to hear from you. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Theological Horizons. Come by my website, karenwrightmarsh.com. You'll find out more about the Vintage Saints and Sinners podcast, get show notes, and learn about my book, Vintage Saints and Sinners. You can download free personal study guides for your small group or just for yourself, and keep the conversation going. Thanks to the generosity of the Lloyd and Vivian Noble Foundation and to the friends of Theological Horizons. I hope you'll support the vintage saints and sinners podcast with a tax deductible gift to TheologicalHhorizons. Go to theologicalhorizons.org/giving, or donate on Venmo at theological dash horizons. The Vntage Saints and Sinners podcast is produced by Gabriel Hunter-Chang. Our music is by Will Marsh of Gold Connections.